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Extractive industries can provide great opportunities for post-conflict peacebuilding in resourcerich countries by providing revenue to finance reconstruction and set the economy back on track. However, the process of resource extraction often poses challenges for peacebuilding. This article first explains the various challenges that valuable natural resources can pose in post-conflict countries, and establishes a typology of post-conflict contexts where extractive industries, the host country, and the international community can play primary roles as peace promoters. It then elaborates on the specific roles each of these actors can play: i) what approaches are available for responsible companies that aim to be peace sensitive and even promote peace and development locally and nationally; ii) how a country that has some capacity and political will to secure long term peace and development can promote responsible exploitation; and iii) how international actors can promote responsible company and government behaviour in countries with low capacity and willingness use the natural resource base for the best of its whole population. ; Copyright © 2016 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In recent years, 'the local' has moved to the forefront of the contemporary peacebuilding debate, as evidenced both by growing scholarly interest in 'the local turn' in peacebuilding and by the emphasis on legitimate, inclusive politics in policy discussions surrounding the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States. What is less clear, however, is how community-level peacebuilding activities can be effectively integrated with longstanding efforts to build peace by building viable, accountable state-level institutions; there remains, in other words, a conceptual and empirical gap between top-down and bottom-up peacebuilding processes. This article draws upon a case study of community-level peacebuilding and violence reduction in the urban slums of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince to illustrate the importance of vertical integration for sustainable peacebuilding. It argues that in the absence of explicit linkage — in particular through local-level institutions of governance — with broader statebuilding processes, community-based peacebuilding efforts may ultimately prove to be more palliative than transformative.

This article examines the effectiveness of UN peacebuilding missions in democratizing war-torn states, emphasizing those missions that include democracy promotion components in their mandates. Based on a multinominal logistic regression, we reveal that democratization is significantly more likely if a UN peacebuilding mission is deployed. Furthermore, regimes categorized as more liberal at the outset have an increased risk of revealing antidemocratization trends over the post-war period. Oil wealth impedes democratization and clear victory of one conflict party makes regime transitions more likely, yet in both directions. Descriptive statistics suggest that an increase in the mission's capacities may be conducive to democratization.